


Space for One More

by DesertVixen



Category: Room for One More (Urban Legend)
Genre: Creepy, Gen, IN SPACE, Not seeing things, People never believe Cassandra, urban legend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 16:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18855184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/pseuds/DesertVixen
Summary: A retelling of the "Room for One More" urban legend in space...





	Space for One More

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/gifts).



“Sure you won’t come along, Cassi? There’s room for one more in the shuttle.”

Lieutenant Cassandra Stack looked up at her fellow weapons officer. Lieutenant Nick Lacey always looked like he had stepped off a recruiting poster, tall and handsome, always perfectly pressed. His bright blue eyes had a way of laughing even when things were serious. Right now, they were enticing. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go down to the planet and hang out in the colony’s bar, but these weapons emplacements wouldn’t maintain and calibrate themselves. As much as she enjoyed Lacey’s company, he was hardly going to roll up his sleeves and get into the guts of their weapons.

She shook her head, wiped her greasy hands on her coverall. “Not right now. I’ll try to come down later, after these cannons are done and I get cleaned up.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Nick said with a grin.

She watched him walk away, followed by a tall dark man in the black coverall the shuttle pilots wore. The pilot looked back at Cassi, and she shivered. There was something odd about the man that made her glad to see him leave. 

She wondered why she had never seen him before. The station wasn’t a large one, and she didn’t think they’d had any new crew members arrive. But she didn’t have time to think about it, and put it out of her head while she worked on the weapons. She would ask Nick about it when she got dirtside.

*** 

Cassi had just finished with the last cannon when the station’s alarms starting wailing. Pioneer Station was a fairly small space station orbiting the lush colony world of Demetria. It wasn’t the most glamorous post in the Space Forces, but someone had to stand watch there. Trade was good, but piracy was always a threat, this far away from the homeworld. 

As she hurried to the lift that would take her to the station’s command center, Cassi assumed the alarm was pirates. She was glad she’d finished the maintenance on her weapons. The pirates were about to get a nasty surprise.

But it wasn’t pirates. Nick’s shuttle – the shuttle with thirteen full seats and one empty one – had crashed. Cassi would be keeping her promise, but she would be going down as part of a rescue party.

Or a burial party.

*** 

They were all dead. Nick’s body lay near the cockpit, as if he had been trying to go forward and help the pilot. His bright blue eyes were open wide, but the laughter was gone forever. She knew all of them, of course, but Nick was different. He was special. She forced herself to not think about it, forced herself to focus on the task of preparing the bodies for transport back to the station.

It wasn’t until all the bodies were prepared and being loaded into the shuttle that Cassi realized something strange. The pilot’s body was nowhere to be found in the shuttle – only the people who had been going down for shore leave. It was impossible that anyone could have survived the crash, especially not in the badly damaged cockpit. That, and she had seen the pilot following Nick with her own eyes. She brought the issue up to the senior officer on the scene, the station’s chief engineer. 

He seemed to think that Nick had been piloting the shuttle, but before she could explain that he had not been qualified as a shuttle pilot, the engineer was off on another grim task. 

Cassi didn’t fare any better when she tried to talk to the station’s executive officer. It was making her angry. Nick would not have tried to pilot the shuttle, and no one else in the group – none of her friends who were now waiting on a very cold trip home – had been qualified either. That, and the crew was strictly forbidden from flying the shuttles, as the shuttle pilots had a strict contract that ensured they were well-compensated for a fairly small amount of work. The pilots were not about to jeopardize that arrangement.

But she didn’t get anywhere with one of the pilots she knew, who insisted that there were no new pilots. Cassi got irate when the pilot insisted she must have been seeing things. She knew she hadn’t been seeing things, and she intended to prove it.

But when she pulled the security footage from the weapons bay, Cassi was dismayed to discover it didn’t show the pilot. It showed her and Nick, but there was no dark man in a black coverall. She was starting to wonder if maybe she had imagined it. Maybe she was working too hard.

But if she had imagined it, who had piloted the shuttle?

*** 

Over the next few weeks, Cassi didn’t forget about the dark man, but she was simply too busy to give him much thought. The loss of thirteen people out of a small crew had taken its toll, and everyone was working extra long hours.

That, and the fact that everyone acted like she had dreamed up the pilot.

She knew she had not.

So she stopped talking about it, and tended to her weapons. She kept her thoughts to herself.

It was the third week when she saw the man again. She had been standing watch in the command center, and needed the lift to get down to her quarters. Cassi only wanted to lay down and sleep, and it seemed like the lift was taking forever. 

When it opened, the dark man was standing there in his black coverall. Cassi had been about to step inside the lift, but froze. His stare was cold and empty, and made her feel as if she was being watched by a deadly snake. Involuntarily, she stepped backwards as he spoke to her. 

“There’s room for one more.”

She shook her head, backing away until she bumped into a console, watching in horror as two other people got in the lift. They were chatting, and didn’t even seem to notice the dark man standing there. One of them waved at Cassi, but she found herself unable to speak, even though she wanted to scream, to warn them, to make them get off the damn lift.

Two minutes after the lift doors closed, just when Cassi had summoned her courage to try the lift on the other side of the command center, there was a terrible crash from the lower levels.

When she and an engineering officer climbed down the access tube and cut open the mangled hulk that had once been a lift, they only found two bodies. This time, Cassi said nothing about the dark man, said nothing as they went through the motions of the investigation, said nothing as she put in for a transfer.

She knew people thought she was crazy or superstitious when she started making her way around the station using the access tubes and ladders, refusing to get on the lift or even open one. 

She knew she wasn’t crazy, wasn’t seeing things. 

She just wanted to get off the station without seeing the dark man again.

She hoped she could get off the station alive.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like it and it scratches your Halloweenish itch! 
> 
> In most versions of the story, the woman who sees the strange man doesn't die because of the warning, which is what I'm going for. In some versions, they can't find the body and in others, the man was hired just that day. I thought the no body variant would lend itself to a creepier version.
> 
> I also thought leaving the ending ambiguous would add to what you were looking for. And, yes, naming the character Cassandra was a deliberate choice.


End file.
